Puerta Varas

Last Thursday morning we flew down to the Patagonia area. We are super close to Anartica but we didn’t get down to the tip of Chile because we didn’t have the clothes to go that far south. We did, however, go fairly far south to their Lake Region. We had heard about the Chileans spending their summer vacations down there and how wonderful it was. We also heard that if we wanted to go and have warmer weather we needed to go before it got too far into March.

We spent five days down there and learned a lot more about Chile. We flew into Puerta Montt and drove over to the little town of Puerta Varas. Puerta Varas is on the Llanquehue Lake which is the largest lake in Chile. Our hotel was on the edge of town on the lake and was a great place to be stationed since we could walk to town but it weren’t in the middle of everything.

Some interesting information we learned is that this region’s main industry is salmon. They are the second biggest exporter in the world after Norway. This area kind of reminded me of Scotland. It was cloudy and overcast 2 days and sunny the other 3 we were there. They said it rains over 200 days a year. They also have several volcanoes in the region. Chile has 15% of the world’s volcanoes and I think they said for a total of 2200-2300. Most of them are dormant except for around 300 of them. We went to one and I’ll share those pictures on another post. They also have a large German population. We saw many German businesses and houses. Lots of kuchen to eat!

The food was expensive but it was a tourist town. The boys wanted McDonald’s one day but there was no fast food to be found. The first day we rented bicycles and rode around the town which was lots of fun.